Daily Routines for a Successful Freelancer

With 69% of freelancers claiming that technology has made it easier to find freelance work, the rapidly increasing number of freelancers across any industry comes as no surprise.
What daily routine is the best for achieving freelancer's business goals successfully?

Alla Chernets

Technological advance is the driving force in freelancing progress on the job market. What are the best ways to align with this work trend and organize your daily routine to be the most successful self-employed?

What Any Successful Freelancer Knows

With 69% of freelancers claiming that technology has made it easier to find freelance work, the rapidly increasing number of freelancers across any industry comes as no surprise.

However, due to constant digital upgrades and overall digital expansion, freelancers’ daily routine requires crafting the perfect schedule that can ‘squeeze it all’.

The overall goal of managing time on daily basis translates into two major achievements:

managing the planned projects

accelerating towards a stress-free day.

To ensure that you stay flexible and knowledgeable enough to address challenges freelancers face, we suggest tips on daily routine that can be real game-changers.

Ideal vs. Real Freelance

Freelancer's Morning

Ideal Routine: Early Waking Up📢🚀

In real: You snooze 😴The best scenario of organizing your day as a freelancer goes down to incorporating the habits that guarantee to increase your productivity and improve your well-being.However trivial it sounds, if you ‘own the morning, you conquer the day’.

Almost all the gurus and high-achievers admit that they handle their most challenging tasks in the first half of the day. Besides, being consistent with working in the morning will set you free from experience the productivity slump time that falls to 2.17 pm when most people report feeling sleepy and tired.

The ideal technique to try today: Make your waking up mindful, fill it with charging morning rituals and exercise. The idea is to cultivate healthy morning habits and stick to your morning routine due to its positive impact on work. More high-value practical tips on cracking that ‘magic morningness code’ are available here.

Priority Setting

Ideal routine: Tasks are performed in order as planned📊🎯

In real: Any urgency takes you by surprise😕

You start doing one task but then something urgent comes up, and you are immediately stuck up, which leads to being behind the schedule. Hello, procrastination doom loop. To avoid this dramatic scenario, there is an old but gold Eisenhower matrix that will keep you on top when it comes to priority setting.

Setting a high priority to important non-urgent tasks works best. Aside from creating the ideal work routine, allocating tasks within such a priority chart helps avoid the time management crisis by minimizing the chance of urgency and meeting deadlines on time.

The ideal technique to try today: Aside from choosing to focus on the important over urgent tasks, level up your prioritizing skills by ranking your next steps based on short-term objective and long-term objective.

Ask yourself what actions right now are most likely to impact the outcome in the long run. Pay attention to setting ‘in-between goals’. Considering them as important as the final objectives maintains motivation while you are proceeding with big projects and helps achieve your greater goal faster.

Freelancer Workplace

Ideal routine: You workplace setup is impeccable giving you a sense of full control of your work✍

In real: The perspective of never finding something you need is very real😱

Freelancing as opposed to a corporate setting requires additional effort when it comes to keeping things tidy whether it is your actual or digital workspace. Aside from creating a healthy way of working, it projects to your reputation as a professional.

The ideal technique to try today: Unlike in the office, when freelancing you have a privilege of control over the work environment. Make best use of your private space by organizing your home and virtual office with comfort in mind whether it pertains to clothes, temperature and lighting, and accessibility by syncing your working data across services and gadgets you use.

Besides, freelancing implies creating invoices and coping with accounting on your own. With a diversity of tools to choose from, this challenging task turns to a mission accomplished.

Keeping Focused

Ideal routine: you are focused on the project at hand🐱‍👤

In real: You are easily distracted and never stay in flow state🥴

With the exposure to data equal to the number of stars in Universe, it is extremely important to know how to identify 'focus killers'. Otherwise, you risk feeling overwhelmed with all the temptations of comfortable home office and get another roller-coaster day packed with checking on mails and notifications when you feel busy but zero-productive.

The ideal technique to try today: Among lots of apps and tactics successfully applied for achieving deep work mode, the one of special value implies reducing your project time by 20 percent to intensify the state of deep work and maximize mental efforts. This way, you block time and eliminate distractions efficiently.

Task Completion

Ideal routine: Completion of all the items on a daily to-do list 💯

In real: Let’s get real, with all the postponements in mind, it is never 100% 🔜

With 35,000 conscious decisions we take on a daily basis, pitfalls in task completion requiring time, focus and resilience come as no surprise due to experiencing decision-making fatigue. If we try to reduce the volume of low-level decisions it will release energy for more creativity as well as bring more movement to your daily routine.

The ideal technique to try today: It is advisable you plan no more than 5 big tasks. Furthermore, planning prior to the actual day will surely assist you in having a more productive and successful day. Another simple technique to help you save 8 hours a week and utilize time more effectively is to ask yourself three questions in regards to your daily to-do list:

What can I stop doing?

What can I delegate/optimize/automate?

What can I do in a different way?

Accountability of Time

Ideal routine: Staying accountable in terms of time ⏱

In real: You do not know exactly how much time you spent on the project ⌛😩

As a freelancer, you are 100% responsible for managing your communications with clients, meeting deadlines and handling the projects. Thus, you need tools that would meet your expectations in terms of accuracy of work time calculations as in the long run, it is a must-have condition for translating your time into income.

The ideal technique to try today: Clear consistent time tracking routine works at best. It creates not only accountability on what you did and how much time you spent on the project, but helps achieve freelance business goals. Applying automatic time trackers enable you to:

get precise metrics on time allocation and utilization

identify your personal productivity peaks

allocate high performance time for demanding projects and tackle the challenging tasks easily.

Work Life Balance

Ideal routine: Perfect work-life balance 🆗

In real: You can hardly identify the border between your work and life 🆘

Though freelancers’ life might require you to feel like an expert in multitasking, for the sake of sanity (and long-term success), your home must not become your 24/7 work. It won't be an exaggeration to say that work life balance is the key component of freelancer’s success with social interaction rotating around making and maintaining work-related contacts. If your social invitations have dried up because your friends assume you’re not available, you are probably too focused on work. Also, be aware of your behavior when you do take time to be with people outside of work. Are you fully present?

The ideal technique to try today: Be aware that maintaining work life balance is not your new year resolution but rather your daily routine. One of the most effective ways to achieve it is to practice digital detox. It helps you in terms of:

Learn New Every Day

Ideal routine: You incorporate time that will help you grow professionally 💎💎💎

In real: You never read those articles you saved or finish all the online courses you eagerly enrolled ❌

Freelancers striving for success maintain high performance and increase effectiveness of their work by the readiness to learn and adopt new tactics. This way, they take one step ahead of possible challenges.

The ideal technique to try today: Setting a goal to maximize the learning time to at least half an hour a day to learn new things (start with learning practical tips that will bring instant benefit) will improve the quality of freelance work routine with:

being updated on changes within the fast-paced freelance market

'intentional' step ahead approach.

Wrap It Up

Freelancing is future of work that is happening right now, which means that once you are able to set up rules for being your own boss and craft the daily routine accordingly, you can easily embrace the exciting opportunities opening for a successful freelancer across any industry.

Just remember the universal rule applicable to a routine of any successful person: ‘Done is better than perfect’.

By the way, if you are looking for the freelance editor job, you can find it here